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Kaladin reaches the Pinnacle gasping from his run and finds the king alive — a thin cut across Elhokar's forehead the only mark. Standing in the doorway with his hand braced on the jamb, he is unsettled to realise how much that run had felt like a charge across the plateaus toward his men; he hardly knows these people, but they are now his duty, and the protectiveness has reached even to lighteyes. The king waves off the woman trying to bandage him to point at Kaladin and tell Captain Idrin, pointedly, that *this* is what a good bodyguard looks like and *he* would not have let this happen. Idrin reddens and stalks out into the hall — the kind of comment, Kaladin thinks, that will only make it harder for his men to work alongside Dalinar's. He finds Moash and Natam inside among the guards and servants milling around. Moash — he was supposed to be back in camp asleep — was just leaving his shift with the King's Guard when the shouting started, and came back.

Moash takes Kaladin out onto the circular stone terrace cut into the peak rooms of the palace. From here the warcamps and the Plains lay open in spherelight all the way to the horizon, and the stone is still wet from the highstorm. Halfway around, a section of the iron railing hangs out into nothing over a hundred-foot drop, three or four footings pulled clean of their holes and one joint sheared smoothly through. A guardsman who was on the balcony at the time says the king came out to lean on his favourite spot, looking out over the Plains, and the rail simply pivoted forward under him with barely a sound; one bar held, Elhokar grabbed it cursing like a caravan worker, and they pulled him in. Kaladin leans over the drop to look — Syl is drifting in lazy luminous circles down there in the dark — and is jerked back by Moash; he wonders idly whether Stormlight would carry him through such a fall. He kneels and finds mortar dust dry in the empty footing holes; one of the broken joints is far too clean a slice for any honest break.

Dalinar comes out, closes the door behind him, and sends the others in. He tells Kaladin this was not his charge and would not have been his fault if it had been, and asks his read. The mortar has been deliberately chipped at, the joint cut. Kaladin says the whole thing is the trap of an idiot — too contrived, too dependent on the king leaning exactly there at exactly the right time, certain to expose its maker the moment it failed. Dalinar reframes: half the powerful men in the camps are contemplating regicide, and the king has a favourite leaning spot that anyone watching him would know. The attackers use distant, non-confrontational methods — the same hand, he believes, that planted flawed gemstones in Elhokar's Plate earlier. *Not idiots*, Dalinar tells him. *Cowards.* Kaladin adds that they have been waiting long enough that suspicion died down. He runs a thumb across the smooth cut joint and asks what cuts iron that cleanly. A Shardblade, Dalinar agrees — and that narrows the suspect list considerably. They agree to keep that detail to themselves in hopes of an edge.

This was done from inside the king's chambers, Dalinar says — a servant or one of his own guards. He moves up his timetable: Kaladin will take over guarding the king sooner than planned. Idrin will be relieved with a field command (not as punishment), and his best men passed to Kaladin to use as little as possible, until the long-term arrangement is in place — Elhokar guarded only by former bridgemen Kaladin trusts and who hold no warcamp politics. *Choose carefully*, he says; *I don't want to replace potential traitors with bought-off thieves.* Dalinar asks if he can trust Kaladin himself; Kaladin swears it.

As Dalinar turns to go back inside, Kaladin asks whether this was the attempt he had been bracing for. It was not. *If Sadeas decides to strike*, Dalinar tells him — *or the assassin who took my brother* Gavilar — *it will not go this way. The storm is yet to come.* The door opens on Elhokar mid-rant — nobody takes his safety seriously, nobody listens, somebody should be looking for the things he sees over his shoulder in the mirror, whatever that is meant to mean. Kaladin looks once at the twisted rail, reminds himself his job is not to judge his charges, and walks away.